David Foster Wallace is one of those really bad writers who decided, long
ago, that he would hide his lack of talent, acumen, and skill behind a blizzard
of words, then laugh at anyone unwilling to engage them as not understanding his
genius. This is a symptom of what is known as Postmodernism. The fact is,
though, that PoMo has been passé for nearly twenty years. It was in its last
throes when he first got going, in the late 1980s. It’s always bizarre to read
–ismic devotees who are waiting at railyards that no longer are served,
and this is what DFW is, in spades. Basically, if you want to be PoMo you must
lack humor, love clichés, be rapt by stilted conversations and stereotyped
caricatures, and be able to type on a word processor as quickly as you can for
as long as you can and then hope someone with an even more horrid life than
yours will sort through your genius. In 1996, this method resulted in a reputed
three thousand plus piece of lard first draft that DFW turned into an editor, as
he was apparently oblivious to what was good or bad within, which was eventually
trimmed to about two thousand in a penultimate draft, which was then cut to
about twelve hundred pages, and this became his infamous novel, Infinite Jest-
a work that has already made the lists of some of the worst books ever
published, even as others decry it, what else?, genius. That book,
however, is not the subject of this review because I’ve not read the book in
toto- only a few dozen pages here and there, and what I’ve seen makes me sick.
Yes, I’ve read Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, and Ezra Pound’s The
Cantos, start to finish, and parts of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy,
and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, before being bored out of my gourd by
both, as well as assorted other experimental rot, and none of them really
qualifies for high literature, despite the fact that few critics are willing to
actually stick their necks out and call them self-indulgent pieces of crap. The
best of the aforementioned lot, by the way, is the earliest of the works- The
Faerie Queen. That said, I’ve nothing against experimentalism, per se, but
it needs a core- in the art, not just an idea. And, it should be
‘experimental’, not a mere masturbatory indulgence. It should enlarge the
circle of literature, not be a bizarre dead end that serves only the insecure
author’s ego. Otherwise you end up with something like the Abstract
Expressionist hoaxes of mid-Twentieth Century painting, or the LANGUAGE poetry
of the past thirty years, in which, just as in Jack ‘The Dripper’
Pollock’s paintings, words are tossed willy-nilly, just to be tossed, and a
reader is chided for not getting what the LANGUAGE poet didn’t even
intend. Really, that’s the core of it. Similarly, PoMo is a fraud, and its
practitioners doomed to a limbo with only Tom Clancy novels and Donald Hall
poems to read, and from what I read of Infinite Jest it doesn’t even
come close to the crap that is Finnegans Wake or The Cantos.

This is because PoMo writing is the only prose writing that does not
concern itself with words, but the ideas that the words do not convey. The
words, in a sense, are merely a masque for something deeper that the work
conveys ‘under’ the words. Now, I detest readers who read words only,
but have no ability to cohere a strong narrative if provided, but PoMo is
the reverse- it vilifies the attempts of readers to cohere meaning. In fact, it
even vilifies being coded, and given an -ism. For example, it claims to
be self-referential, although most PoMo works, in literature or not, are mere
studies in solipsism, or the opposite, works that avoid dealing with anything
real or ideative. It is all about outline, with no center. In this sense, it can
be metafictive or not, which negates its own definition. See what I mean?
Another ‘tenet’ is intertextuality- such as a Roy Lichtenstein painting on
comics or an Andy Warhol print of a celebrity. Although, intertextuality can
also mean paraphrase or retelling, such as Joyce’s Ulysses taking
Odyssean adventures and re-casting them into 1904 Dublin, Ireland. Two tenets
in, and the muddle is clear, right? Then again, maybe not, as PoMo is also
beyond categorizing. Imagine a John Cage sonata without a single note, or T.S.
Eliot’s masturbatory footnoting at the end of The Waste Land. Oh, wait,
that’s Modernism, although it is also, technically PoMo, too. Ain’t it great
to smash categories by not having them? It’s like a pastiche of ideas, and
pastiches are another PoMo tenet- think of reality tv shows that mix genres.
PoMo is also about punning, except when the puns get in the way of the message
underneath the words which need no rational order since they’re not the point
anyway. PoMo is also pop- that is lowest common denominator, except when
it’s snooty, elitist, and deriding those who don’t get that its LCD leanings
are really a way to sneer down at real LCD trash because the PoMo artist is so
far above such tripe for superior vacuity beats inferior tripe in their book-
which is not a thing that holds words that have no meaning in a PoMo
intertextual sort of way. PoMo is also fictive, metafictive, yet seeks a deeper
truth, unless it doesn’t, which is always the last right, resort, and
refuge of the PoMo charlatan, such as DFW. A good example of this is from one of
the stories in the book under review, called Lyndon. It is a really bad
story, if you want to believe in things as stories, that casts President Lyndon
Johnson as a homosexual who sleeps with a gay African who was stricken with what
would nowadays be called AIDS-like symptoms.

Does the tale illumine the real LBJ? Does it cast an interesting
spotlight on gay issues? Does it make a statement heretofore unknown about AIDS?
Does it dazzle the reader with wordplay? Does it sear you with indelible
characters or moments? Does it make you guffaw at the satire? No to all
the above. Here’s how the tale ends, when the speaker of the piece finds his
gay black lover in bed with LBJ- and note that this is perhaps the most coherent
and best story in this sorry ass collection:

….On the stripped bed- neatly littered with papers and cards, my
notecards, a decade of stenography to Lyndon- lay my lover, curled stiff on
his side, a frozen skeleton X ray, impossibly thin, fuzzily bearded, his hand
outstretched with dulled nails to cover, partly, the white face attached to
the long form below the tight clean sheets, motionless, the bed flanked by two
Servicemen who slumped, tired, red, green. Duverger’s spread cold hand
partly covered the Presidential face as in an interrupted caress; it lay like
a spider on the big pill of the man’s head, the bland, lined carnivore’s
mouth, his glasses with clear frames, his nasal inhaler on the squat bedside
table, the white Hot Line blinking, mutely active, yellow in a yellow light on
Kennedy. Duverger’s hand was spread open over the face of the President. I
saw the broad white cotton sheet, Duverger above and Johnson below, the sharp
points of Johnson’s old man’s breasts against the sheet. the points barely
moving, the chest hardly rising, the sheet pulsing, ever so faintly, like
water at a grat distance from its source.

I wiped mucus from my lip and saw, closer, the President’s personal
eyes, the eyes of not that small a person, eyes yolked with a high blue film
of heartfelt pain, open and staring at the bedroom’s skylight through
Duverger’s narrow fingers. I heard lips that kissed the palm of a black man
as they moved together to form words, the eyes half-focused on the alien
presence of me, leaning in beside the bed.

Duverger’s hand, I knew, would move that way only if the President was
smiling.

‘Hello up there,’ he whispered.

I
leaned in closer.

‘Lyndon?’

Now, put aside that this is from an absurdly bad story, and just look at
the words, naked and alone. There is manifold excess description- the same thing
over and again, yet what is described over and again is not so memorable to
really demand that description, nor is the wordsmithing so indelible that it
allows it. This is just one of hundreds of examples of DFW’s self-indulgence
in this book, and self-indulgence is just that, not excellence. But, as I said,
it gets worse than this tripe- MUCH WORSE!

The book’s first tale, Little Expressionless Animals, is about a
Jeopardy game show champ that rules for three years and the unseemly
lives of host Alex Trebek and some other game show hosts. It’s a pointless
exercise that also tosses in lipstick lesbians to boot, as well having the
retarded brother of the champ ultimately defeat her. Given the recent run of
champion Ken Jennings on the show, last season, you would think that the tale
might hold up well, but even fifteen to twenty years later its pop cultural
references are as hermetically meaningless as the courtly intrigues of John
Dryden’s verse.

The tale Luckily The Account Representative Knew CPR is a tale
with potential to be passable, due to a few nice descriptions, and shows that at
least DFW possessed some potential, unlike Dave Eggers. But, then self-conscious
posing does it in. This tale’s main virtue, it seems, is its brevity. In My
Appearance a tv actress worries over a David Letterman appearance. The
titular tale, Girl With Curious Hair, contains the other writing sample I
will burden you with. In it the speaker is a retro-bigoted sadomasochistic Young
Republican lawyer (larded with all the clichés the term implies) who thinks his
biases are cool and meets a girl with curious hair at a club. Oh yeah, and punk
nihilists he thinks are really deep. Here is the excerpt:

That night
Gimlet and Tit fellated me, and Boltpin did as well. Gimlet and Tit made me
happy but Boltpin did not, therefore I am not a bisexual. Gimlet allowed me to
burn her slightly and I felt that she was an outstanding person. Big acquired a
puppy from the alley behind their house in east Los Angeles and he soaked it
with gasoline and they allowed me to set it on fire in the basement studio of
their rented home, and we all stood back to give it room as it ran around the
house several time.

While this is immature self-conscious writing, it also gives no insight
to its cartoonish speaker and comments in no way on the action. And this sort of
masturbation is the sum of the story times a hundred. It is just masturbation,
pure and simple. And so go the rest of the tales in the book, and the last one-
a novella called Westward The Course Of Empire Takes Its Way, combines
all the flaws of the prior tales into one ridiculous piece whose
self-consciousness doesn’t even succeed in self-parody, with such subtitles as
Foreground That Intrudes But’s Really Too Tiny To Even See: Propositions
About A Lover. I won’t even get into the supposed narrative of the tale
since that’s not the point of the writing- it’s really a comment on
non-narrative cast as narrative about nothing- got it? Its only real points are
to seem cool, and woo gullible coeds with warm pussies to drip- and from all
published reports DFW has indeed ridden this charade to multiple ejaculations
with his comeliest students. DFW rocks, dude!

Yet, the need for charade lingers on. In online interviews DFW claims
that art needs to engage a range of experiences, yet, to read DFW is to read one
long FUCK YOU! to the art of fiction. He is certainly free to do so, but
I call him on it, and have thus battered him as I have with his own pet dildo.
Everything DFW writes about is about himself. Now, certainly all art reflects
its artists, if in nothing but the range of interests his art focuses on. Yet,
DFW’s art is just mememememememe ad nauseam. In one interview DFW even
admits as much, albeit in a delusive way, by showing he is utterly clueless
about his own art: ‘When you read that quotation from Westward just
now, it sounded to me like a covert digest of my biggest weaknesses as a writer.
One is that I have a grossly sentimental affection for gags, for stuff that’s
nothing but funny, and which I sometimes stick in for no other reason than
funniness. Another’s that I have a problem sometimes with concision,
communicating only what needs to be said in a brisk efficient way that doesn’t
call attention to itself. It’d be pathetic for me to blame the exterior for my
own deficiencies, but it still seems to me that both of these problems are
traceable to this schizogenic experience I had growing up, being bookish and
reading a lot, on the one hand, watching grotesque amounts of TV, on the other.
Because I liked to read, I probably didn’t watch quite as much TV as my
friends, but I still got my daily megadose, believe me. And I think it’s
impossible to spend that many slack-jawed, spittle-chinned, formative hours in
front of commercial art without internalizing the idea that one of the main
goals of art is simply to entertain, give people sheer pleasure. Except to what
end, this pleasure-giving?’

To rebut: DFW lacks humor, is in no way concise, and does not entertain.
Just reread the two selections above if you doubt me. I’m sure he was stroking
himself over how laugh out loud it was to have the ‘vision’ to toss
LBJ in bed with a gay African, but who else thought it a riot? Fortunately, not
as many people as one might fear. Yes, there are critics that called one of the
stories a stunning experiment in dialect, even though the piece in question, John
Billy, was virtually dialect free- its ‘experimentation’ is minor
typographical play, as dialect is not a visual quality, but a word
quality. That said, the tale is William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, if
written by someone without talent and vision, and addicted to B sci fi films-
i.e.- DFW! Yet, despite all the words attached to him in a negative vein-
exasperating, asinine, poseur, overwritten, overwrought, and silly, the best and
most comprehensive word I can think of is underwrought. DFW is clearly
one of those people who just type as fast as their sticky fingers can take them,
with no thought to structure. He lacks any graceful command of language- see
above, ye doubters. In poetry, this is known as a stale sub-genre called FOUND
POETRY. He merely tosses whatever pops into his little head, and has no idea
that revision and editing are the most important parts of writing. His works
read like really dull and poorly wrought first drafts that have no good ideas,
nor form, nor bite. He has no sense of realistic characters, as all of his
people seem lifted from B films. He is an example, yet again, of an artist whose
work could have zing, were these tales merely a piece here or there in a larger
oeuvre that included genuine works of accomplishment. A few Pollocks can be
interpreted as an attempt at something, but drip painting after drip painting is
laziness, pure and simple, and DFW’s word drips are just that. As you can see
in the Lyndon excerpt, he will say the same thing over and over, but
offer no parallax- it is just repetitive, indicative of a bankrupt mind, and a
schtick that was tired long before he picked up a pen. DFW is also not in any
true way creative- he’s a Functionary file drawer mind with no vision whose
occasional drawer spillings are what accounts for his ‘stories’. In short,
he’s a PoMo poseur at a time when that is long passé and even its biggest
devotees are seeing that you can’t fool all the people all the time, despite
the hipster interns at the major publishing houses who somehow snooker their
bosses into spilling this pabulum to the public. From what I’ve read, each
successive DFW book has garnered him bigger bonuses and returned less in profit.
If you want to know why even the few good writers out there get only 15%
royalties on their intellectual property it’s because slugs like DFW, whose
former students are now in control of the slush piles, need to have their
unreadable, and DULL and unoriginal work financed. I see no real talent in his
work, at least that here, although he is good at advertising, that soundbitten
realm- where many PoMo writers could actually excel, and unless he took a
sharp U-Turn in the future, which I doubt by looking at the reviews of later
works, he is destined to increasingly ridiculous praise, lessening sales, an
irreversible slide to irrelevance, and the unremitting scorn of critics in a
hundred years who will be laughing at the literary poseurs of today, and their
sycophant critics, the way the Salonistas of 19th Century France are
reviled for their ignorance of the Impressionists. PoMo is merely code for
trite, directionless, and pointless writing, for nothing can really happen in a
PoMo tale, lest eviscerate its very PoMo status. The very concept is about
making art simply by calling something art, even if it lacks any craft or
insight. DFW does nothing to alter these definitions, he indulges them, and
therefore is the only person in the world who really cares for his art, and the
only one who really ‘gets’ it- not intellectually, but coolly. His
writing is not complex, nor difficult, just cluttered- and that’s an important
distinction. Complexity and difficulty require connections to be made between
characters and events in a narrative, even if obliquely, as in the worst of
Joyce, which still requires craft and effort, which is not what DFW, nor PoMo,
is about.

Instead, there is an infantile need for hipness, dull, turgid exercises
in avant gardening, to tell a story about a story that references a story about
a pop trend that is ephemeral, rather than tell a tale with fully developed
characters that do not behave in clichéd ways- ah, metafictive non-narrative!
Instead, let your readership explicate what the tale is about, and no matter
what is said, even if contradictory, merely assent to its correctness. What is
good or bad, right or wrong interpretation, anyway? How many times, when reading
a review of PoMo writing, does one encounter a claim of what a thing is about,
even though the thing is not about that at all, and the claimant cannot even
point to a single point to support their claim? There is a difference between
saddling a reader with all the work of extracting meaning from work that has
none, and rewarding readers with multiple (but not infinite) interpretations if
they do some work. And, please, do not even think of trying the old dodge of
claiming I’ve quoted DFW’s crap out of context, because PoMo negates
context! And when I say what something’s about, in his work, I
really mean that in a vague sense, as PoMo is never really ‘about’ a
thing. Thus, his work lacks connections to the outer world, despite the name
dropping, and is suffused with detailed minutiae that serves no purpose, and is
so ill-written, that even were there a sense of purpose under the lard, no one
would care to extract it. In short, self-indulgent writing is merely
self-indulgent writing, not daring, much less innovative, and to
even call this writing trash is to demean the hardy biosphere of vermin. Fluff
is the heart of his work, and solipsistic nihility its soul. DFW is, at best,
‘potentially mediocre’, and that might be attained in twenty or thirty
years, if he gets cracking now. Of course, history shows that in about fifty or
so years this sort of crap will be openly seen as the long practical joke it is.
Good, and especially great, writing forces connections upon a reader by bringing
things up from the depths to the pellicle of its engagement, and allowing the
reader to pop the bubbles or not. PoMo and DFW have no such aspiration, and
therefore no bubbles surface in their anaerobic cesspool. Now, breathe out,
slowly….

[An expurgated version of this article originally
appeared on the 7/05 Hackwriters
website.]